Xiaomi's Mi Notebook leaked ahead of official unveil

Xiaomi is all set to unveil its first notebook running Windows 10 at an event in China on July 27. First live photos of the notebook have surfaced ahead of its debut, highlighting a metal chassis and a USB-C port on the side.

We'll know more about the internals and pricing later this week, but a leak suggests that the notebook will offer a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD for the equivalent of $600 (¥3,999). There's also a pro model in the works that will retail for $1,000 (¥6,699), featuring a Core i7 6700HQ Skylake CPU, NVIDIA GTX 970M video card with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and 512GB SSD storage.

Microsoft has finally realized the worth of Chinese OEMs in propelling Windows ecosystem forward. Chinese OEMs offer quality devices at economic price points. Just like Huawei Matebook has been a first value for money windows 10 tablet product, Xiaomi's offerings will offer compelling high quality ultrabooks at economic price points which will help windows ecosystem grow. Exciting times ahead.

I dunno if this is just me....... But this seems to be targeted at Apple than anybody else. Because Chinese people tend to pick local brands at cheap prices that are good quality. Hence Apple has been hit pretty hard in China recently and lost market share as a result. Surface Brand and other PC makers will be fine though.

I doubt they'll be able to make a profit at that price in India, which, IIRC, has some nasty taxes for stuff not made in India. I'd guess the price tag close to 50K rupees if the device is exactly the same as spec'd here. I mean, a direct conversion from USD would put the SP3 at roughly 50K, but you can only get it for 75K in India. Similarly, the iPhone 6 originally retailed above 100K - more than 50% above its direct-conversion price.

I wonder, though, since I'm currently living in India too, do the same taxes apply if, say we were to import something from eBay international?

It is the walmart theory. Move tons of stuff, only make a little profit. If your products are good enough, prices are good enough, people will buy in mass, making you a very profitable company indeed. Go look at wal-marts financials, and you will see that they only make about 1-3 cents on every dollar of merchandise they sell, but they sell so much merchandise, that all ads up.

Fact is, you can make billions of dollars in profit, selling products for less, if you move enough of them. So for Xaomi to make the kind of money apple makes, they are going to have to sell waaayyyy more, but it is possible. Basically it is what windows computer makers have always done in comparison to Apple, only this time you have a company who is willing to take even less.